“You have so much within you! Let it grow and
develop, and do not forget your old friend who
believes in you and your great power of
expression.”
–Dane Rudhyar, letter to Fine, 1930.
“Vivian Fine’s is a talent of no small
magnitude. She is already technically equipped for
almost any problem in music and inwardly possesses
such a real antipathy for romanticism, such a real
love for music in its purest form that in her
Four Polyphonic Piano Pieces heard in
Yaddo, one could not help being moved by the sheer
truth-beauty which emanates from them.”
–A. Lehman Engel, The Symposium,
October 1932
“A
brilliant musician is Vivian Fine. An agile
pianist, admirable coach, extraordinary reader at
sight of most difficult scores, this young Chcagoan
transplanted to New York is well and favorably
known to our musical world. Yet very few people
realize that this serene, amazingly modest girl is
a splendid composer, a creator of music of fine
substance and outstanding mastery.
–Lazar Saminsky, Musical Courier,
February 1, 1943
“Vivian Fine was a genius. Everyone needs
to recognize her as one of the greatest American
composers of the 20th century.”
–Greggory Cannady, DMA candidate, University
of Colorado, Boulder, 2007
“the inner qualities [of Fine] are the
same—natural technique and a rigid lack of
compromise with anything but her very
best.”
–Henry Cowell, in “The Music of
Vivian Fine,” by Wallingford Riegger,
Bulletin of the American Composers
Alliance, vol. 8, no. 1 (1958).
“Miss Fine’s music combines emotional
intensity with an intellectualized
technique…No rule-of-thumb, no simplified
method, no easy short-cut to popularity or fame
mars the authenticity of its fine
hand-work.”
–Virgil Thomson, American Music since
1910 (New York, Holt, Rhinehart and Winston,
1970).
“An avoider of circumscribed
systems….Her choice of subjects in her stage
and vocal music shows imagination and
wit….”
–David Mason Greene, Greene’s
Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers,
Doubleday, 1985.
“Vivian Fine’s music does not fall into
easily recognized categories. It does not exactly
accord with the conventions of the concert-room,
where formal musical devices and their
manipulations are expected, nor to the theatre,
where music, whether elaborate or modest, is
expected to fulfill a role subordinate to drama. I
think I can best describe her work as highly
compressed music-drama, or in some cases abstracted
ritual in concentrated musical terms, expressed in
the instrumentation and proportions of the concert
hall. No two Fine pieces are alike either in
subject matter or instrumentation; each new work
appears to generate its own style appropriate to
the subject, and there are no mannerisms which
persist from work to work.
“In larger
combinations, Fine conceives initially of resonant
unformed masses of sound as a sort of raw material,
available for direct “moulding” into
sounding musical shapes or configurations. The
results, in works such as Paean and
Missa Brevis, produce varied and
unexpected textures very different in their effect
and evocative action from music devised in
accordance with the canons of a
’system,’ whether intervallic,
harmonic, rhythmic, temporal or
aleatoric.”
–Henry Brant, program notes for Drama for
Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, January
1983.
“Vivian Fine belongs in this grand old American
maverick tradition of…Ives, Harry Partch and
John Cage….Sometimes her music…has this
marvelous inner quiet, where it just sort of rests
and has this marvelous repose and long
lines—and in a way that you don’t often
encounter. It’s not the long-lined romantic
gesture of the 19th century—it’s a kind
of leaner mood, something I think is probably very
American. If you think of images like the prairies
out in the Midwest, these immense expanses in our
Midwest, that kind of simple terrain. Then of
course, by contrast, she writes this very lively
active music…the shapes of the lines are to a
large extent unpredictable….She’ll lull
you into some kind of a preconception of
what’s going to happen and, so to speak, pull
the plug.”
–Gunther Schuller, “A Tribute to Vivian
Fine,” produced for National Public Radio by
the International League of Women Composers,
1986.
“Fine’s music is remarkably consistent.
Though the 1944 Concertante for piano is milder,
with clear hints of diatonicism, she has stuck fast
to her original style, very successfully broadening
its expressive and generic range, and suffusing it
with a distinctive humour and considerable
emotional force. She is a highly significant
composer, original, unfailingly individual and wry,
quite unlike anyone else.”
–Bea Weir, in Contemporary
Composers, Morton and Collins, Ed., Chicago:
St. James Press, 1992